When a process just won't die
 

Last night I started up gmplayer after [probably] not closing down mplayer correctly. (All done from the command line) So mplayer came up complaining about lacking some library and the panel was a blacked-out shadow of the panel. I couldn't click anywhere on the display area or panel. When I click "X" to close it, it doesn't close. So then I type:

and get a list of processes. gmplayer is 1473 and mplayer isn't on there.

So I type:

Nothing happens!

It's still there. I tried this as my user name because that's how I started it up. I would try it as root, but when I type

as root, it doesn't show up there so I'm not sure what consquences would come from trying it as root. I'm sure I could fix this by rebooting, but I would like to learn how to do this for the future.

Thanks,

If kill doesn't work.. you have to try a kill -9 to force the kill with no questions asked.

Hi DJOtaku, you should try xkill. Makes it much easier to kill random windows. As fas as ps, try ps aux (man ps to find out what these are). It'll show up then. When you try to kill something, there are different levels of how "cleanly" to kill it. So for example if I try kill -1 someprocess
It will try to kill it but not at the sake of leaving something undone. ie closing files, returning resources, etc. Sometimes though it can't do it so you have to just kill it anyway. You can do that with kill -9 someprocess. Of course there's still 2-8 in between those two but I can't remember right off how they are seperated. Just man kill. You should also look at killall as it does a cleaner job of killing a process in general. Hope that helps.

thanks you two. That killed it right away. (kill -9)